2004-01-15

Risiken von Bushs Weltraum-Mission

--- Gestern war es also soweit: Bush hat vor der NASA in Washington seine bereits vorab mit großem Tamtam bekannt gemachten Pläne zur Eroberung des Weltalls ausführlicher erläutert. Mit teils sehr schickalsschweren und leeren Wahlkampf-Worten: We do not know where this journey will end, yet we know this: human beings are headed into the cosmos. Bushs Konzept: First we take the moon, than we take the Mars. Die New York Times warnt in einem ausführlichen Artikel jedoch vor den zahlreichen Risiken der Mission: The history of bold visions for human spaceflight is littered with more failures, delays and cost overruns than clear successes. ... "People are happy and worried at the same time," said Lawrence H. Kuznetz, a scientist at Baylor College of Medicine who conducts research for NASA. The effort to return to the Moon, instead of going straight to Mars, he added, could become "a bottomless pit of misdirected targets" and "suck up NASA's budget faster than a black hole sucks up light." ... John E. Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington research group on military and space topics, said the Bush plan was unlikely to go anywhere because, unlike President Kennedy's call to excellence during the cold war, it addressed no underlying national political issue. It was, he said, just election-year grandstanding, and dangerous at that. "The trivial budget increases they're proposing are only going to produce artwork," he said. "Basically, they looked at piloted space and said, `Let's shut it down and let's have a hedge against the possibility that the Chinese will go to the Moon. That's it.